


Drowned

by byzantienne



Category: Tokyo Babylon, X/1999
Genre: Horror, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-27
Updated: 2008-10-27
Packaged: 2017-10-04 00:15:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can't tell if the typhoon is pointed at Tokyo or not, yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drowned

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through TB and X/1999. Warnings for hurricanes, being unkind to investment bankers, and other forms of natural or unnatural disaster.

The arches of this man's ribs are slippery from the inside, slick already with blood. Subaru twists his hand. The man's heart bursts like an overripe fruit -- his mouth drops open -- petals, deepening through pink to red, land on his open, gasping lips, stick to the spittle there. Subaru lets him slide off his fingers, watches him collapse. The way he falls, the shocked laxity of tendon and muscle, the angle of the pile of bones -- it's obscene. The tree rears up above him, fattened, gluttonous, dark.

Subaru turns his back on it while it eats. The petals are getting in his eyes again.

Red drips off his fingertips in heavy droplets. The sound of the wind sinks, fades -- the light resolving back to twilight grey -- something wet snakes down the back of Subaru's shirt-collar. He reaches up with his clean hand, draws away fingers damp with water. When he looks up at the sky, the rain is a dull surprise.

He walks back to where he'd hung his suit-jacket over a park bench. A newspaper (_supertyphoon aimed at Japan -- Tokyo approves baseball stadium plans -- yen reaches new high against dollar --_) has blown up against it, soggy and discarded. The jacket is damp.

In its pocket, his cell phone rings.

Three chimes and then a beat of silence, tuneless. Subaru tries not to get too much blood on the fabric when he pulls the phone free.

"Sumeragi Subaru," he says, answering. The words feel heavy in his mouth.

On the other end of the call, the voice is feminine and assertive underneath the tinny distance of limited reception. "Sumeragi-sensei," she begins, "I am calling on behalf of my employer, Kitamura Haito. He kindly requests your services at the soonest opportunity."

"Which of my services?" Subaru asks.

There is a short pause, like a deliberative breath. "Your services as an exorcist," the woman manages, finally -- there's a dignified resignation to her tone, something displeased. "Kitamura-san finds himself plagued by the persistent memory of his late wife."

"In what fashion?" The rain drips into his mouth when he opens it.

"He hears her speak. It -- distracts him from his work. His associates -- ah. See her image in our place of business, as well. Wherever Kitamura-san goes."

Subaru tells her, "Please convey my sympathy for Kitamura-san on his loss." The other end of the line makes a soft, non-committal noise. "If you would be so kind as to arrange an appropriate time for me to visit his workplace and speak with him, Ms. --"

"Arai Taiko."

"Arai-san."

She details arrangements. Listening, Subaru watches the blood on his jacket pocket spread out in thin capillaries, inexorable in the wet.

\---

Everyone at Sumimoto Mitsui Financial Group's third office building carries a cell phone or a Blackberry or both. The tower crawls with the noise of their thumbs tapping, swarms around itself in a parade of slim black suits. _It hardly has room for a ghost,_ Subaru thinks. Catches himself, wonders without curiosity if he is growing old. Older.

Arai-san meets him outside the elevator on the fifty-seventh floor. She is small, compact in a jet skirt-suit, her hair a riot of artificial curls to her breastbone. She does not look like her voice _(more like who the voice on the phone was trying to erase, someone decorative and elegant )_ \-- she bows. He returns the gesture. It occurs to him, abruptly, that someone might have made her like she is, brittle, thinks _did Seishirou-san look at me like --_

Arai-san is already turning, beginning her tour of the floor. She doesn't see Subaru's face, see any expression on it at all.

"Kitamura-san did not come to work today," she explains, leading him into a corner office. Two whole walls are glass, floor to ceiling. Outside, heavy cloudbanks push up against the harbor, thick and overpowering. It is like being inside the sky.

"This is his office?"

"Yes."

"If you would excuse me," Subaru says. He reaches for an _ofuda_, presses it gently to the glass. It sticks. Arai-san is watching it, not him. Subaru closes his eyes.

Before he can sense anything but a faint hum, a presence, something unclear and -- mislocated -- some young man, his tie half undone, charges into the office.

"Arai-san!" he says, brushing past Subaru. "Arai-san, can you call Kitamura-sensei, the American markets have dropped again and he'll want to see this -!"

Arai looks at the man -- an intern? a younger employee? -- at Subaru, back and forth. There's something white, something sharp in her eyes, to the left of her shoulder, a shape.

"Perhaps you should call on Kitamura-san at his residence," she says, and gives Subaru the address.

\---

Subaru takes the rooftops.

One of the news networks has splashed the sattelite image of the approaching supertyphoon up on the building-side screen that usually displays its advertisement campaigns. It whirls there, gyrating through the last two hours of recorded movement, sped up and pixellated for public consumption. Subaru can see the edges of Japan on the map, in the upper northwest corner. He can't tell if the typhoon is pointed at Tokyo or not, yet. No one can.

Tokyo isn't paying attention; nobody in the street below is looking up at Subaru looking down, at the conflagration of wind and water racing toward them. _Nowhere else can you see so many people,_ Subaru thinks. The rest of the phrase is a memory, a voice repeated often enough that it almost sounds like his own. The hand not holding his cigarette is cold and ungloved on the rooftop rail; he notices how his his knuckles have gone white. He's not sure of the cadence. If he said it out loud, it might be clearer.

He stubs out the cigarette. Shoves his hands in his pockets, steps off the roof and drifts to the ground, soundless. The spin of the typhoon glitters neon on the hair, the jackets, the bright shoes of the pedestrians surrounding him.

Kitamura's apartment is a penthouse flat. The building is run Western-style, with a doorman and a concierge behind a desk in the lobby. The tile floor is marbled, white shot through with black, black with white, diffuse and blurred, a matte endlessness that shows no reflection. Subaru introduces himself, lets the concierge call up, wave him toward an elevator, murmur politenesses.

In the elevator cab, his stomach drops with the speed of ascent, with dullness and lack of purchase. There are handprints, skin-oil slick, on the metal rails. Subaru adds his.

Kitamura-san meets him at the door while Subaru is looking down, toeing off his shoes. Subaru catches his shape out of the corner of the eye which still belongs to him, broad shoulders and height draped in a dark coat, dark hair, the glint of glasses -- reacts before he thinks -- one long shudder all the way down his spine, every inch of his skin aware and anticipating, vigilant --

Straightens. The line of Kitamura's jaw is nothing like _(what he remembers)_ Seishirou-san's. Over a Western-style handshake _(to match the apartment, Seishirou would have bowed--)_, Subaru wonders how he could have mistaken, even for a moment; doesn't he remember _exactly_ \--

"I'm sorry Arai had you come all the way here, Sumeragi-san."

"It isn't any trouble," Subaru tells him. "Please accept my condolences on your loss."

A distance settles on Kitamura's face, falls into the beginnings of heavy lines around his eyes and his mouth. "Thank you," he says. "I loved my wife very much. It has been difficult."

"I -- I hope she is a good memory for you."

Kitamura shrugs, heading deeper into the apartment. Subaru follows him. "She was very young. I remember that about her, how much she had in her future."

There is nothing in Kitamura's apartment that Subaru can sense. Nothing at all but a quiet sort of emptiness. He remembers --

"When I was seventeen," he finds himself saying, "I lost my -- sister."

Kitamura looks at him.

"I can't imagine what it's like to lose a spouse," Subaru goes on. "I've never -- married. But my sister was young, too."

"My wife was hit by a car," Kitamura says, as if he's decided something. "She stumbled on the street and fell in front of it. I was -- angry. I still am."

"Because --"

"Because it wasn't her fault."

Subaru imagines Seishirou saying: _it wasn't her fault_, imagines the words in his mouth like Hokuto in his arms, bloody and broken open. He blinks the image away.

"Why did you ask Arai-san to contact me?" he asks, instead.

"I didn't," says Kitamura. "She did that all on her own."

Oh. _Oh._

When Subaru leaves the building, the whirling typhoon on the sides of the buildings has opened its enormous jaws wide to swallow Tokyo whole. The long curve of its tail just brushes Kamogawa, and its savage tendrils lick out to touch Ito, Izu, Numazu. The eye, marked static-white in pixels, stares the heart of the city down.

\---

In the morning, the news is full of evacuation orders. Most of the Diet is already gone, says the radio. There are perhaps forty-eight hours left before the typhoon arrives. The suggested routes out of Tokyo are Highway 17 and Highway 254...

Subaru goes to work, instead.

Sumimoto Mitsui Financial is in chaos. The flux of employees in and out of the building has gone manic and absurd; no one needs to be there and no one can bear to leave. Subaru finds the young intern from the day before, the one who was so concerned about the American markets. He is pale, with spots of hectic color riding his cheekbones.

"Sumeragi-sensei!" he exclaims. "Surely you have somewhere safer to be --"

Subaru doesn't, really.

He interrupts. "Before his wife passed away, did Arai-san go everywhere with Kitamura?"

The intern blinks at him.

Subaru waits. He can wait as long as he has to. He thinks he learned stillness from watching for Seishirou-san to move.

"Y-yes," the intern stammers, finally. "She's his administrative assistant, she would do anything for him --"

"Thank you," Subaru says, and goes on.

Arai is sitting at her desk on the fifty-seventh floor, just outside of Kitamura's office. The typhoon is spinning gently on the screen of her computer, and her hands are splayed -- clawed -- on the edges of the keyboard.

"Arai-san," Subaru says. "I spoke with Kitamura-san yesterday afternoon, as you asked."

When she raises her head, her eyes glitter like knives. "Did you remove his wife's spirit from him?"

"No," Subaru begins.

"Why not?"

"Because she wasn't there," Subaru says. He reaches inside the breast of his jacket and pulls out _ofuda_, holding them loosely between his knuckles.

"That doesn't make any sense," Arai protests. "He's not _right_. There's something wrong with him, he's distracted, he _cries_ \--"

There are tears inside the shimmer of her gaze. Subaru doesn't feel anything, not even the sympathy he wants to remember.

"How do you know how he feels?" he asks her.

"I _know_," she insists. "I know everything about him, everything he needs," her face savage, exultant, "and I see her everywhere, _siphoning_ \--"

"_You_ see her," says Subaru, evenly.

"Yes --"

"Everywhere Kitamura is."

"_Yes_\--"

"Everywhere you --"

"--I should be --"

The _ofuda_ slip from his hands with his breath, hover and fly at right angles. "Even after she died," Subaru continues.

"-- after _I killed her_ \--"

Outside, the wind is rising. Subaru can hear it over his voice, woven through it, covering it as he begins to chant. The lights die. The air is full of the wings of his _shikigami_.

He wonders, pulling Kitamura's wife from her like unravelling a skien, if Arai will remember the shape of the woman she'd wanted to be once she cannot see her any longer. Wonders how long it will take before she -- loses that, too.

She sobs, low and horrible, afterward. Curled in a discarded heap next to her desk. Subaru bites the inside of his cheek hard enough that he tastes blood.

When his phone goes off, his startled gasp flecks his lips red. He almost drops the slim metal case.

He answers it out of habit.

Lady Sumeragi's voice is paper, the only dry and rustling thing in the world. What she tells him makes no sense, and then too much of it.

"How many?" he asks her.

"Two hundred or so, from most of the Tokyo shrines," she says.

_Refugees_, Subaru thinks, helplessly. He is still looking at Arai, at the crumpled and aggrandizing arrogance of her. _Two hundred refugees._

"Yes," he tells his grandmother. And then, "But send them to Kanazawa. It's -- _safer_ there."

There's no victory in her acquiescence, nor in his demands.

\---

There are, in the end, one hundred and seventy-eight, mostly monks and priests. They have tents and radios and brittle smiles. The cloud wall follows them out of Tokyo, turning the sky dull green and sick gold by inches.

Subaru puts them in the gardens, behind the gate. They have been warned not to go into the house, and he thinks they will listen. No one goes into this house any longer, except Subaru, and Subaru doesn't go any more. The inside would be hollow. A discarded shell. _(And if he doesn't breathe the air there will still be air Seishirou-san had exhaled -- )_

He seals them inside with a single white _ofuda_, stark against the gate's iron: one hundred seventy-eight holy people and him, and the gardens of the Sakurazukamori. It is already pouring down rain. The radio crackles and hums its disasters to itself.

The gate rattles. Someone gasps, too loud. There's a person on every surface, feet on every piece of grass, crushing the last of the wild summer flowers and the hungry weeds, everything not soaked with rain covered with shoes. Subaru -- _wants_ \--

\-- all of them gone --

\-- for _this_ (crowds and rage and self-delusion and someone is crying) he saved the world --

No one goes into this house any longer and --

The wind comes down, hard like a slap. The rain goes sideways and all the trees bend double, bend double and stay bent, every leaf straining at the end of its stem, trembling -- the air is full of torn vegetation, flower petals, twigs -- Subaru's eyes, both of them, the one he owns and the one he was given, stream and water under the force of it. He can't see anything but the afterimage of his _ofuda_ unpeeling from the gate.

Behind him, the wind reaches the buildings and all the windows shatter. Something sharp cuts across his cheek, distant pain, the warm trickle of blood burning amongst the cold tracks of rain, of -- _tears_

_\--dripping, smearing the blood and spit on his face, dilution, and then Seishirou-san's tongue, hot, pressed flat and then sweeping over his cheekbone, tasting -- **is it different this time,** Subaru thinks, **do I taste different** \-- opens his mouth but can't say anything, just noise around the pain, around the way he's twisted under Seishirou, bent. Burn, expanded and exploding, barely localized in the dislocated joint of his hip, the snapped rib, contusions, the gaping slashes from the edges of flying **ofuda** \-- all the places where Seishirou had caught him, thrown him, bore him down out of the pouring sky, covered him -- Seishirou thrusts and Subaru moans, takes his blazing hands and cups Seishirou's skull, **turns** him, slams their mouths together -- he's dissolving -- the rain beating down on them under the perverse shelter of Seishirou's trenchcoat -- Seishirou bites his lips, **shudders**_, says --

"-- the storm surge is expected to reach unprecidented levels --"

Everything's shorted out but the radio, still blaring even coated in water and shards of glass. Subaru grits his teeth. Strips to shirtsleeves and _ofuda_. Walks against the driving rain -- his suitjacket, waterlogged more black than grey, flies off behind him, plasters itself against a tree -- and slams another _ofuda_ against the gate. It glows like a white bonfire.

Slowly, the wind dies away.

\---

Three dead, eighteen injured.

Subaru goes back to Tokyo because he can't think of what else to do.

There is glass everywhere there isn't water, and most places there is -- glass and paper, sodden dirty lumps of matter clotted on every surface. Debris and garbage, the bent trunks of trees and lampposts, all of Tokyo turned into refuse. Subaru sits down on the twisted hulk of what he thinks used to be construction scaffolding, leans against the wall of the building it had been protecting. His skin is clammy, he feels chilled and sticky all at once, his stomach a tight, churning ball between his lowest ribs.

_Wreckage_, he thinks, pressing the side of his face against the building.

There's nothing left of use. What's been preserved is random and meaningless -- a park bench. A street sign. He makes himself keep his eyes open and look at it all. There's no difference between what has happened to any one part of the city; _all_ the neon lights are out, and all the leaves off all the trees, a strange winter out of season.

He tries to breathe and almost chokes, thinking -- suddenly, with a sharpness that is unfamiliar and near-forgotten -- that maybe everything he has become he's become because it was done to him, that Seishirou-san was something that just -- _happened_ \-- like an earthquake or --

A meaningless disaster, bad luck, ill-fortune, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That he might have been something else, instead.

But he can't remember how it felt _before_; the memory of it. The shape and feel of it. He only imagines a great emptiness of desire, a lack of volition; and he doesn't know if he remembers his life before Seishirou-san this way because it was true or because disaster changes you, because you can't go back to the before it happened -- or because memory is slippery, memory reconstructs and remakes, and if he wasn't like this he wasn't himself.

\---  
.


End file.
